Anticipating Sun and Moon Alignments

Originally posted in 2010, I occasionally bump this forward in my blog to tell people that they can plan to take an amazing sunrise moonset or sunset moonrise shot on an upcoming date.  As I update this on September 17, 3013, here on the California/Nevada border the moon will rise at 5:50 pm tonight and be about 12 degrees up in the eastern sky at 7 pm sunset.  Somewhere with something tall to place the moon next to should work well, like Yosemite Valley.

Tomorrow the moon will rise around 6:25 then be about 5.8 degrees up in the sky at sunset (close to 7 pm).  That will work best somewhere with a relatively low horizon.  These times will vary by your specific location on the globe, and the application described below can correct the times for your position.

I used to line up moon shots the old-fashioned way... looking up the full moon rise, arriving and seeing where the moon was emerging, predicting where it was going, and changing my position several times to try to be in just the right place at just the right time.

Fortunately there's an application that takes a lot of the guesswork out of lining up the sun and moon with natural or man-made objects to take stunning photos. The application The Photographer's Ephemeris allows you to plan a shooting location for a fairly exact alignment with particular landmarks: Free Download for PC or Mac

It runs on Google Earth satellite photos, so you can easily see your planned shooting position, it shows you the azimuth angle (compass direction) of the sun and moon at any give time from there, and you can read the elevation angle as well.  If the lineup isn't just right as the sun or moon is coming over the horizon, you can adjust your shooting position (at various times and stages in the sun or moon rise) to get just the alignment you want.

View the tutorials for some examples of the capabilities of, and applications for, this program.
Tutorials: stephentrainor.com/tools#tutorials  You'll be surprised at just how easy and intuitive it is.

Below are my results from researching on TPE a much more subtle event: anticipating and planning for the position of a crescent moon. I identified two positions a couple of blocks apart for two different times, then adjusted my position a few yards onsite to place the moon beside or behind the same courthouse, while avoiding trees or power lines.

So fire up TPE and go give this a try in your area on the next full moon rise (and set), or whenever!  Let me know how it goes.

 Remember to pick a target reasonably far away (say 1/2 mile to several miles) to put the moon alongside, so you can use a long zoom lens and capture the moon appearing really large beside it.

Olmstead Point Dawn Full Moon Set

Olmstead Point Dawn Full Moon Set, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

In late July I positioned myself to catch the full moon rising at Mono Lake. It had rained during the day, but as I sat on the porch of the lcoal coffee shop waiting to see how the weather woudl turn out, it was clearing up nicely for sunset, and hopefully the moonrise. One of the nice things about photography is that the people really into it are a pretty relaxed and sociable bunch. I ran into filmmaker Tom Lowe at a coffee shop in Lee Vining, and he was heading out to Mono Lake as well. A young woman with an accent had shared the table and power for her laptop, and not knowing the area, when she heard we were going to a nice sunset location, she decided to follow along in her car.

We drove south out of town, and as I turned left onto a shortcut, Tom missed the turn and kept going towards the standard highway 395 to highway 120 route towards South Tufa. The woman, Rotem Retter from Israel who had come to the U.S. after serving in the Israeli Defense Force, made the turn. By now a large rainbow was forming in the remaining showers over the Mono Basin, so I stopped at a turnout near another photographer's car. This turned out to be Ron Wolf. We had seen each other's work on Flickr, but had never met.

As I continued on, I decided that the clouds would obscure the moonrise, but they were well posisioned for shooting sunset at South Tufa. I called Tom with the update, but by now he was already set up elsewhere, and decided to stay put.

The clouds were fine for sunset, but as i had suspected, they were too thick to allow the rising moon to show through. This is why it's critical to try to shoot as many sunset full moon rises as possible in a given year... there are only a dozen or so to start with, and weather will obscure many of those!

No problem... I could still catch the moon set at dawn. After having the June 26 partially eclipsed moon set at Olmstead Point behind a nearby ridge before it woud have set on the horizon, I decided to shoot this moonset there as well, so I could find a better shooting position that would enable the sunrise to proceed further as the full moon set.

It turned out even better than I could have planned. The sun was sending light rays over the Eastern horizon, while the moon acted as a gaint reflector, sending more of the sun's rays radiating back from the Western horizon.

I had high expectations for this sunrise, or at least high hopes. After all, I had looked up the moonset and sunrise times a week or two in advance, checked sun and moon angles for various locations in The Photographer's Ephemeris to select my shooting location, gotten up at 3:55 over by Mono Lake to make it here in time, and to place the foreground hill out of the way for the moonset I decided to hike up the granite slope across the road instead of down to Olmstead Point. To do this landscape photography thing right, it's a far cry from just arrive, point and shoot!

"A lot of people think that when you have grand scenery, such as you have in Yosemite, that photography must be easy."
- Galen Rowell

I continued to shoot as the clouds and light changed, and there were some majestic juniper trees on the hill which added nice foreground subjects. But I was done by 7am or so, with no plans for the day.

As with the prior sunset Rotem had decided to check out my shooting location, and having hiked Mt Dana the day before, she was eyeing Mt. Hoffman today. I had no plans for the "boring" mid-day light, and the trailhead was only a couple of miles away, so this time I tagged along.

After we moved food and scented items fomr our cars to bear boxes, we got an early enough start to reach May Lake while I could still catch a reflection with minimal wind.

The entire hike is only a 6 mile round trip, but the trailhead is at 8710 feet and you end up at approximately 10,850, so it's a healthy climb. I'm never particularly fast lugging 10-12 pounds of camera gear plus 3 liters (another 6 pounds) of water, but it's an enjoyable hike with a nice view.

Unfortunately there was a fire somewhere which cast a haze in the air. With the distinct possiblility of afternoon thunderstorms, after some rest and chatting with other hikers on top, while protecting day packs from persistent marmots wanting to steal food, it was time to make a hasty descent.

Penumbral Lunar Eclipse While the Full Moon Sets

With the middle of the eclipse forecast for 6:38am, the exact full moon time at 6:50 and sunrise time of 7:03, this was promising to be one of the easiest and most colorful eclipses to cover in a long time. The only challenge was the weather. Rain the night before caused me to give up trying to catch the moonrise or moonset in the Bay Area, and when I looked outside at 6:30am it looked like gray clouds were still dominating the skies in Auburn as well.

I decided to head to a nearby viewpoint anyway in case by some miracle there was a hole in the clouds that I could catch the moon through, and there it was, fully visible! More often than not when I take a chance on weather, it pays off handsomely.